The Art of Caesar's Bellum Civile

Traditional approaches have reduced Caesar''s Bellum Civile to a tool for teaching Latin or to one-dimensional propaganda thereby underestimating its artistic properties and ideological complexity. Reading strategies typical of scholarship on Latin poetry like intertextuality narratology semantic rhetorical and structural analysis cast a new light on the Bellum Civile: Ciceronian language advances Caesar''s claim to represent Rome; technical vocabulary reinforces the ethical division between ''us'' and the ''barbarian'' enemy; switches of focalization guide our perception of the narrative; invective and characterization exclude the Pompeians from the Roman community according to the mechanisms of rhetoric; and the very structure of the work promotes Caesar''s cause. As a piece of literature interacting with its cultural and socio-political world the Bellum Civile participates in Caesar''s multimedia campaign of self-fashioning. A comprehensive approach such as has been productively applied to Augustus'' program locates the Bellum Civile at the interplay between literature images and politics.